Whimsical, Wooly, and Weird: Charles Fort's Book of the Damned!

This book was not what I was expecting. Seeing it referred to in so many works of fiction, I expected it to be fiction or fictionalized accounts of foggy real events. In actuality, it contains hundreds and hundreds of references to real reports in journals and magazines, and Fort's attempt to offer alternative explanations for them in a somewhat unserious way.

Fort himself was a strange combination of stamp collector and skeptic. He maintained a huge collection of snippets from real scientific publications about anomalous occurrences. From strange colored rains, odd things falling from the sky, unexplained astronomical observations, and weird lights in the sky, he had hundreds of such reports. I even looked one of them up and it's a real report from Nature. (See the middle right part of the page)

For these unexplained events, Fort criticizes scientists for their hubris and proposes a solution with as much reality behind it as some of their guesses: the Super-Sargasso Sea, a collection of blobs floating in the air from which materials occasionally fall to earth.

Is it a serious answer? Not really. Fort himself said, "I believe nothing of my own that I have ever written." But his point about scientists being too sure of themselves is an important one. Plus, collecting and maintaining these reports is definitely something to admire and value.

His solutions are either whimsical flights of fancy or collections of inexact and frustrating word salad. Part of the problem is that he's trying to apply the scientific method to isolated events, and falling into the error of taking a hypothesis solicited from a professional hypothesis-maker as a convinced opinion.

It's a strange and interesting book, especially if you like accounts of strange anomalies.

Read it here:
https://archive.org/details/bookofdamnedbych00fortrich/page/n7/mode/2up